Strategic Management: From Theory to Implementation, Fourth Edition
A thorough text which helps understand where strategic management comes from, and how a corporate strategy can be formed and implemented.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Strategic Management: From Theory to Implementation, Fourth Edition
Chapter 14: Strategy
Overview
In this, the first of several chapters about strategy formulation, the aim is to explore some basic approaches. The chapter stresses the importance of considering several options. One of the earliest tools of strategic thinking, gap analysis, is demonstrated. The majority of the chapter shows one simple way of examining different strategic options, using a matrix derived from one originally developed by Igor Ansoff. Although not the latest strategic thinking, the approach is still useful as a first stage of thinking, and may be all that is needed in very simple situations.
Some aspects of the strategic planning process have already been discussed in considerable detail. In other chapters most of the essential groundwork of the strategic plan has been worked over. At this stage in the process we may assume that the company has set its objectives, defined its social responsibility, established all the assumptions on which it will base its plan, and now fully understands its own strengths and weaknesses. All this work will, as a byproduct, have provided the company with a number of opportunities for further study.
This chapter will consider certain aspects of corporate strategy in some detail with the intention of analysing the various approaches to the formation of strategy. In later chapters attention will be focused on more detailed analysis, and eventually on the strategic plan itself.
Definitions of strategic and operating planning have already been given. Because the difference between the two activities is important, it is worth turning attention once...
Copyright David Hussey 1998 under license agreement with Books24x7
